Efficient Patch Module for Single-bank or Dual-bank Firmware Updates for Embedded Devices
Ondrej Kachman, Marcel Baláž · 2020
This paper deals with firmware updates for embedded systems, more precisely with the update processing on target devices. It presents a new lightweight yet efficient patch module for differential updates. It also provides analysis and comparison of two update strategies, single-bank and dual-bank approach. Differential updates use delta files that encode only differences between firmware images and require different processing than standard full firmware image transfer. The designed module is written to be easily portable to different hardware platforms. It reduces the amount of memory pages that must be erased during an update to preserve durability of the memories. The paper describes the patch module, its take on the single and dual-bank approaches, discusses advantages and disadvantages of each approach and shows experimental results from its implementation for the nRF52840 system on a chip from Nordic Semiconductor. Contact authors of this paper for source code of the patch module.